


this is my body and soul here

by Mook_aron



Series: berries black as midnight, skull as white as snow [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: BAMF Sakura, BAMF everyone, Everyone Has Issues, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Sasuke is insane, Strong team 7, Uchiha Sasuke centric, Violence, danzo is a slimeball, eventual poly platonic team 7, instability, itachi is not a good sibling, legit insane, same universe as my root sakura au!, sasuke centric, sasuke needs a psychiatrist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:07:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25567186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mook_aron/pseuds/Mook_aron
Summary: Fall upon your knees, sing: "This is my body and soul here"Crawl and beg and plead, sing: "You've got the power and control"When he is 8, a man murders his family.The man is his brother. He wants to forget him.
Series: berries black as midnight, skull as white as snow [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1158539
Comments: 27
Kudos: 108





	this is my body and soul here

1

He knows-- he K N O W S-- he knows that touch is pain and steel and the creep of  _ blood-false-not-blood _ across cobblestone-wood-dirt- _ hiskitchen _ and he skirts around the bodies long since moved but he sees them etched with moonlight on their empty eye sockets and he knows that kindness is a  _ wolfthattearsandhowlsandgorgesitselfonhissoul. _   
  
Sasuke knows touch is death and that the wolves know it too.   
  
They lurk around the glass of sanity, curling rotten flesh of half-bared jaws revealing crooked teeth and meat that dangles blue-black and red.   
  
The sky is blue  _ red _   
  
The clouds of white  _ black _   
  
The sky is blue _ red _ blue _ redred _ blue **_red_ **

_ Don’t you know child? _

_ Your sky is blood and your clouds are ash. _

_ The uchiha devour their young. _

2

He’s never been able to sleep properly. Even as a child, his slumber was fitful and short. 

Itachi's room had been next to his, a convenient place to bury his weeping face in the night with no questions asked. Father would’ve have derided him and mother would’ve fussed— his brother would lift up the blanket and curl him against his chest.

This brothers’ bed had been empty more often than not before the massacre. Sasuke wonders, years later when some tingle of a trigger brings up the memory, where he went so often and whether the tears down his cheek were for them.

Itachi never cried, his eyes were always dry and Sasuke cried for him sometimes. 

Itachi cried in heaving shoulders and dry eyes tucked against Sasuke’s shoulder.

  
  
  


Sasuke doesn’t sleep much at all these days.

  
  
  


He decides that the corpse of his father is his unofficial therapist, ashen paper face still lit by moonlight and he talks, late into the night, to this apparition. He tells his empty-eye-socket father that he skirts around corpses to leave his house and that Izumi-san lays across the entrance to his favourite courtyard and it’s dreadfully rude of her to block the path with such a note of finality.

  
  


Sasuke can’t move the corpse of a ghost but it would be so impolite to step through a corpse, even if it’s only there sometimes.

He tells his father of the man with the cane, who stands at the entrance to the clan grounds sometimes and asks if he can come in for tea. His eyes are uchiha charcoal and he burns like amaterasu in the shadows of the trees.

Sasuke says no every time.

_ he is afraid. _

He sleeps best when he lays on the dust-mould-blood- _ desperation _ of his brothers bed and the smells chokes out the dreams that fill his nights and replaces them with the insidious crawl of a centipede through his veins and the dreams of red skies and dark clouds and the realisation that blood is  _ soft _ and feels like silk on the skin.

  
  


Sasuke has never ever forgotten that blood feels like silk and it dries tacky like toffee and it smells like the meat market on the east side of town and it is sharingan red and it feasts on its own rotted corpse. Blood feasts on blood and though the stains are long gone he knows how much blood turned tacky in the courtyards of his home.

  
  


His home.

  
  


Home, home, home is where the heart is.

  
  


Where is his home?

  
  


_ Don’t you know child? _

_ Your home is tinder and your family, ashes. _

_ The Uchiha devour their young. _

  
  


3

Sasuke stares into his own dark eyes and thinks  _ wrong. _

He has eyes. They glint and glimmer and they shine red in the sun, like the reflection off obsidian and the water-oil shine of a birds back. 

There are only these eyes left of his family—

_ Demons don’t have eyes and they don’t have names, they don’t have feather thin lines and skin that smells like comfort and they don’t have tears of sorrow and anger and insanity tearing their minds betwixt thought and frenzy in the moment of cataclysm- _

_ —  _ he is alone and no one cares.

  
  


The wolves howl and clamour in his mind and he wants to be anywhere but in his own mind.

  
  


_ He  _ had eyes, dark and luminous and as sleek as gloom dripping from streetlight-thrown shadows. Had eyes, rusted red and copper thrown into disarray, into a frenzy and he hadn’t  _ always  _ had the eyes of a demon.

The walls are creaking, leaning into retrograde and misery, the paint warping before his eyes and he can hear how the moans of water-bloated and sun-blight weakened wood walls undertone the whisper of grief that clings to his home. The doors swing inward, buckling as if a storm rocks the foundations but the night is clear.

Sasuke buries his face in against his knees and casts himself away from the deck of sanity, if only just for a moment.

_ Don’t you know, child? _

_ Your eyes are stone to blood  _

_ Your mind is oil to the inferno. _

_ The Uchiha devour their young. _

  
  
  


4

Sasuke (is he sasuke?) sits in the same seat everyday. He walks the same path (where are the streets lined with cobble?) in the morning, past the corpses of clan guards at the gates, triads of gaping voids facing the sky and he (they?) skirts the pools of blood that lay across the way. 

He walks a different path today, and he does not sit in his regular seat. Uchiha Sasuke (this is not him) skips school entirely, and lets his feet carry him to the river. He takes nothing with him, except his gear and a stick of incense.

For today is the anniversary of the beginning of the end.

The koi swarm around the food floating on the water tension, gulping mouths swallowing down far more water than necessary and Sasuke (are they Sasuke?) gulps down air like he (they?) is drowning beside them.

Itachi (betrayer? brother?) took him to this dock before he left. 

Sasuke watches the fish and ponders how long it would take to drown.

  
  


_ Don’t you know child? _

_ One doesn’t drown their woes in water _

_ The uchiha devour their young. _

5

Sasuke (notnotnotnot) discovers the wonders of sake the night he graduates.

He ties the hitaite above his eyes and he wanders through his empty(blood-darknesss-moonlight-deathly-quiet) house to his brother's room. And he stands in front of the aged desk mirror and weeps.

He can only see his brother and Sasuke lunges, vicious and wild, to the mirror and tears it down, watches as it shatters on the tatami and bounces in shards of light-catching glass.

He raids his parents bedroom and does not glance at the dark patches of dry blood (wet and tacky and it still glimmers in the moonlight) as he grabs the first glass bottle he finds from the second shelf.

It tastes like bitter fire going down his throat and it soothes something, or maybe it burns it away. 

By morning in the compound, every house is decorated by mirrored glass-shard floors— there are no mirrors left.

Uchiha Sasuke(nonononono) turns up to the team assignments with a hangover and bloody fingers. Nobody comments.

Sasuke does not recognise the name of his female teammate. 

_ Don’t you know child? _

_ Sacred fire cleanses but sake does the trick. _

_ The uchiha devour their young. _

6 

When Sasuke(nononononono) sees those blank eyes, the wild lunges and the glass of sanity shatters, like so many mirrors just hours before and—

There is blood on the concrete roof, dark and red and it  _ glistens _ in the sun. It doesn’t glow like moonlight-blood on cobblestones or absorb so much light it appears black on his mother’s clothes and the tatami beneath her.

But there’s a kunai— his?— lodged in the girl’s arm and he vomits before he can stop himself, numb and cold to everything. He watches through shuttered reality as the girl heals herself.

He’s not sure how he ends up in the Yamanaka district but he knows Kakashi-sensei is there. He feels tough fabric under his hands— worn and rough fibres that have been weathered into odd patches of varying smoothnesses. 

  
  


The glass(broken gone gone gone) inside his mind is slowly building back up again, no longer that impenetrable barrier and he sees the wolves hungering at the gaps, hot sour breath filling his lungs with what he knows death smells like. 

He thinks he’s clutching sensei’s jacket.

He should be embarrassed.

He should let go.

He should let  _ go. _

Sasuke (no please it’s not me) doesn’t let go.

He still hasn’t opened his eyes.

He doesn’t want to see.

He grips to the fabric like the life ring it is, an unshakable anchor to the here and the now. He wants to stay rooted in this moment, doesn’t want to face the eyes of those around him and their inevitable pity. He’s tired of being pitied. 

He just wants to close his eyes.

He doesn’t want to see.

  
  
  
  


Eventually, he has to open his eyes.

  
  


He’s in a living room, it appears. It’s modern, simple but well furnished. The vase on the table is the same one his mother owned (he bites back fire that threatens to melt it into slag) and it holds nothing. He can’t see through to the insides but he assumes it is empty ( _ empty? full?emptyfullemptyfull _ ).

  
  


There is a mirror.

Sasuke(not hard) looks away.

He recognises the man in front of him, opposite the couch he has been sat down on. He’s leaving blood on the white cushions, he noted detachedly( Inako-baasama left blood on her cushions too, almost the exact shape as well. He’ll have to tell her later).

Kakashi-sensei is next to him, eyes trained on him, waiting to meet his gaze.

He catches the eye contact and feels his gut roil, threatening to burn and empty itself as nausea rises.

He looks away. 

Sensei leaves his hand entangled in his jacket.

There is nowhere else to look.

He meets the eye of the Yamanaka man sitting across from them. For an instant, he recognises him as Ino’s father.

  
  


He sees nothing a moment later.

  
  


He wakes up in an empty house, in an empty compound with an empty mind.

  
  


Someone has removed the glass.

_ Don’t you know, child? _

_ Nothing is behind your eyes _

_ The uchiha devour their young. _

7

  
  


He drags himself to the field the next day. He doesn’t change his clothes. It should bother any rational person, to wear clothes marked with blood.

  
  


But Sasuke has been covered in blood for years, even if only he can see it now. He is far from rational.

He operates entirely on instinct the entire time they fight, mind catching glimpses of what his hands bring about as he struggles to  _ prove  _ he is worth a place in this world. He won’t be his brother (he can’t).

  
  


He’s just about ready to snap when their teacher pulls his stunt, mind so close to fraying that he’s already reaching for a weapon by the time the silver haired jounin shows up and even as his stature relaxes, he doesn’t let go of the kunai clutched in his weapon pack.

He walks home at sunset, sky crimson (redblackredblackred) and gold as the sun sinks below the horizon. Everywhere it’s light touches is lit up an earthy gold and it lines the streets with interleaved patterns of golden sun and dark shadows that stretch along the stone streets.

The compound is dark and littered with familiar shapes when he arrives home.

Inoki-san lays across the doorway of her home, hand reaching out for a babe that lies scant inches from her— both of their eye sockets are empty but the pain on their faces in still clearly apparent. He swallows thickly and steps past them, training his eyes directly in front of him.

Even in the dark, Sasuke knows where they all are.

He knows how they died and he’s one of the only people that does.

He owes it to them to remember.

_ Don’t you know child _

_ There will be no one to remember you _

_ The Uchiha devour their young. _

  
  


8.

Despite it all, he loves them.

He realises it scant weeks after meeting them.

They make him feel human. They make him feel real. He feels like Sasuke among them, not the scion of the Uchiha clan or the survivor or a figure to be pitied. Sakura heals their scrapes, taps him over the head with a hand and calls them both idiots, and Naruto shares his amateur attempts at cooking, always piling his section high with sweet cherry tomatoes and sweet egg omelettes. Kakashi-sensei steals them when no one is looking— even when people are, unashamed and unrecalcitrant in his glee at annoying them.

The jounin feels less like a teacher and more like an older brother, scabbing food and teasing them for silly things.

Sasuke enjoys it.

He enjoys feeling like he belongs, in a place where Itachi has no hand in it and has no influence.

This place, the field by the river and the red bridge— its far more comforting than his home will ever be.

  
  


_ Don’t you know child? _

_ The river has consumed all _

_ The Uchiha devour their young. _

  
  
  


9.

There’s a burning in his neck.

  
  


Someone has lit hot motor oil along his veins, a searing magma pain that flows around his body.

There is someone nearby— he sees hair the colour of the clouds in the sunrise and he cannot place why the thought of them makes him cry.

The fire is chasing through his mind and the glass begins to crack in the heat, the frames of his worldview melting as the inferno swallows him.

  
  


The wolves are upon him moments later and they tear at him, at the good he has found and he watches his families, the old and the new, slide down into their pungent maws— past teeth lined with scraps of blue and white and red.

His mind burns purple and the fire spreads.

A black mark curls out from his neck.

Sasuke doesn’t know who the children are.

_ Don’t you know child? _

_ The uchiha devour their young. _


End file.
